Today we paid a visit to a permission (TS1) of which we hadn't been to since 10th April this year. We had 8 hours 18 minutes of daylight to complete today's survey. With 20 minutes less light than last week we had to make the most of it. We had another pair of hands to help so we had two large coils and a standard 9" coil all powered by the GMP mode.

The first signal was a first century Roman fibula complete with pin. This appeared to be a better start than it was back in April.Steadily, more Roman coins and grots, four Roman fibula fragments, Roman pottery and flint came up from the newly seeded ground. The top soil is on average 30 inches deep, below this is solid chalk.After a very sticky beginning, the sun and breeze started to dry off the surface and therefore reduce the weight burden of the Muck Boots!Surprisingly, quite a few Medieval artefacts were recovered and the obligatory hammered in the form of a Queen Elizabeth Ist half groat. Another lovely find was a miniature lead votive axe and a denarius of Trajan dating to 98 AD. A C13th Medieval shield type pendant with enamel still showing also came up. Another find of note was a leaf shaped arrow head.

Our third man retrieved a signal and consequently put it in his pouch instead of the finds box. Rob just happened to be adjacent to him when he said it was only a nail and spotted that it was indeed a Roman fibula!Alarmingly he said he'd found a few bronze "nails". Thankfully they were actually copper nails. It makes you wonder how many artefacts have been mis-diagnosed over the years.

Forty-three Roman coins were recovered in total including the Trajan denarius.As you can see from the montage, the machines were picking up tiny minims. As an example, the minim pictured here against the Trajan denarius which is 8.54 times the mass of the minim and 2.17 times the diameter of the minim. If you're recovering minims of this size then you won't miss other coinage such as denarii, nummi or Medieval coinage, unless you use a <100% coverage policy.